Tyneside Sounds Society: Black Metal & The Ruins of Industry
This was a talk I gave at Sounding The North symposium part of Sound Festival 2017 in Aberdeen. Symposium asked the question - Is there such thing as a Northern Sound?
My half hour was about the Tyneside Sound Society , dormant sonic and musical cultures in Tyneside and the North East of England interspersed with some interesting historical and topographic details, collisions and nice images.
http://sound-scotland.co.uk/sounding-the-north
Thanks to Fiona Robertson and Pete Stollery from University of Aberdeen for being great hosts.
My name is Michael McHugh, I’m a producer and have worked for Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums or TWAM for just over a decade
I’m also a broadcaster and DJ; run a record label called Signals, programme a series of irregular podcasts called Signals from the North and helped start a project called the Tyneside Sounds Society. I used to promote and run dance music parties and other kinds of late night gigs.
This is Newcastle based singer/songwriter Richard Dawson. The track is called A Parents Address To His Firstborn Son On The Day Of His Birth.
It’s from an album called The Glass Trunk which was released initially by Tyneside based record label Alt Vinyl and later reissued on Domino Records in 2015. The album was produced in response to and as part of a project we at TWAM initiated in 2012 called Half Memory.
Half Memory was about the excavation of memory and imagination. The fleeting moment and the forgotten story. We (TWAM) invited artists and musicians working with sound and the moving image to unearth material from our collections to inspire new work. Photography. Illustrations. Artefacts. Diaries. Ephemera. People. Places. Stories and Ideas.
TWAM is a joint museums and archives service that manages collections and venues for 5 local authorities and a University. This is 9 museums and galleries and a regional archives service across the metropolitan area of Tyne & Wear in the North East of England.
We have 1.1 million objects and 14km of archive shelving.
For Half Memory Richard’s brief was simple — go into Tyne & Wear Archives, which is based at Discovery Museum in Newcastle and search for anything. Once you’ve found it make half an hour of music. The comedian and Writer Stewart Lee wrote the following about The Glass Trunk in the Sunday Times -
(It) is a mesmerising and pungent selection of seven eerily keened faux folk songs forced into form from scrapbook scraps and forgotten family papers.
Penetrating the heart of the archive’s hidden stories, Dawson draws out hidden truths in strong bold strokes.
Here’s what Richard said about the album -
It is concerned with the functions and consequences of violence, as well as with opposing forces — creation and destruction, memory and time, birth and death, body and soul.
Richard went into archives and wrote songs about the material he found. Photographs of blind children visiting Sunderland Museum in 1913. Songs from the late 1700s about drunk men killing horses in Gateshead and Russian ice breakers built in the Shipyards on the River Tyne in the 19th and early 20th Century to forge new paths through the Artic seas.
Some of these Russian Icebreakers, constructed on the Tyne in early 1910s, were designed and the build supervised by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. In 1921 he wrote the early speculative dystopian fiction We which was a precursor to Brave New World and 1984. Yevgeny lived in Newcastle for a number of years and hated it, much of the novel We was inspired by his life on Tyneside.
This is a gramophone recording of King George V speaking at the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead on 10th October 1928, part of the ceremonial address to mark the opening of the Tyne Bridge. It was recorded by Columbia Records and published as a souvenir of the event. It is an object from the TWAM collection. It’s not particularly rare or that remarkable.
Here is the recording. The quality isn’t great but you can hear the speech and get a slight sense of the acoustics of the gallery.
In late 2016 the Tyneside Sounds Society was founded by museum professionals; sound artists, producers and amateur sound recordists. The society is a live research community collecting; remixing, broadcasting and performing historical and contemporary North East of England as sound.
For launch of the society, back in March this year, we invited producer, turntablist and improviser Mariam Rezaei to perform a live improvisation at the Shipley Art Gallery using samplers, time-coded vinyl and room microphones and only the digitised audio of the gramophone record.
Here is an edit of Mariam’s performance -
When developing the performance we talked a lot about the acoustic properties of the gallery and also had long conversations about experimental composers like Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier in particular the 1970s piece I Am Sitting in a Room. It was really interesting how Mariam cut up the audio live and recontextualised the speech.
1928 was two years after the General Strike in the UK, there was high levels of unemployment, poverty and social deprivation especially the North of England, if you discount the short industrial boom around WWII this was the beginning of the end for Britain, its empire and dominance around the world.
We opened out the brief we gave to Mariam to a wider cohort. We made the gramophone recording available for download publically and invited people through social media to make something new using only that audio.
Rules were simple.
No added synthesis or instrumentation with the exception of voice. Only use the recording of the speech.
This was a no budget, sprint project, an experiment to test how people would creatively respond. The tracks submitted would form the content of our first monthly Tyneside Sounds Society broadcast on Resonance Extra, the sister station to Resonance FM. This regular show would be dedicated to the recording and reinterpretation of the sonic environment and sound heritage of Tyneside and the North East of England.
With a two week deadline we received over 25 new tracks from 22 different producers, all based in the North East. The quality and diversity of productions was high and the shows mix came together really quickly, it essentially created itself.
Here is one submission that is a particular favourite of mine by North East producer Mark Hand -
You can listen to all of the tracks in full here -
The Tyneside Sounds Society isn’t a society in the traditional sense, there are no membership fees, minuted AGMs or long drawn out board meetings.
It’s an idea, a social experiment, a loose network and creative platform for experimentation and trying new things out.
It’s also about connecting the archives and museums, the venues and collections with an as yet undefined creative and collaborative network in the North East.
You could view the sounds society as an intersection of these three things —
Where does field recording come into this and what did I mean about ‘performing historical and contemporary North East of England as sound.’ ?
First I want to mention a contemporary network of artists, producers, record labels, musicians and groups who are either based in, connected to or work(ed) from the North East of England and Tyneside.
It isn’t a formal network or exhaustive list. There is less than a degree of separation between all these people and groups who have, over the course of the last decade, all gained in some form or another, a regional, national and international reputation or recognition for what they do or have done.
It’s a network — that locally — is really overlooked, especially by the larger cultural institutions.
It’s a pretty dense family tree of connections and collaborations. There are names you may recognise, others you will not.
I’m not that interested in categorisations. For arguments sake though we might say this network is made up of experimenters/innovators, sound artists, we could talk about techno, dance music, industrial music, ambient, dark ambient, post-industrialists, esoteric-dronologists, pseudo-ethnomusicologists, singer/songwriters, folk artists and phonographers…….I’m really hesitant to say alternative or underground because I don’t know what that means.
These are people that are challenging the norm and the status quo. They are all people who are redefining what a northern sound is and challenging expectations, especially for the North East of England.
They respond directly to the landscape, topography and environment we live in and also use it in the most literal sense.
The interest in field recording, across the last decade has exploded. The accessibility and relatively low cost of technology has enabled this. Manipulations and the use of field recordings and what we call found sounds in productions and compositions is common practice and the differentiation between synthesis and sampling, these days, via new technologies is non-existent.
Contemporary audiences and listeners are also more willing to accept long form environmental recordings as performative or creative experience. The popularity of BBC Sound Recordist and Newcastle based musician Chris Watson is good example of this.
His recent immersive exhibition and composition TOWN MOOR — A portrait in Sound at Tyneside Cinema presented a compression of sound recordings made over a year in the life of a large and unique moorland area in Newcastle located in the north of the city centre.
Through the sounds society we hold a regular Record-A-Thon, flash events inviting people to record enmasse a given area or location in Tyneside.
These are social events and you could say there is a performative aspect to them. We’ve had two Record-A-Thons since March and made over 300 recordings of Tyneside which are then accessioned via the internet archive and the popular global sound map Aporee.
When the sounds society was formed I was really interested in emerging independent cultures of contemporary collecting (especially sound) and how the museum would respond to these.
What could the museums relationship be with those cultures?
How does the museum respond to the contemporary creative network I described earlier? In short, apart from Half Memory in 2013 it doesn’t. Forming the sound society is one attempt to address that.
So what about the North East’s sonic and musical heritage? Before that I want to briefly think about the North West or more specifically Greater Manchester where I’m from.
This is a track called Rettic AC by the mancunian duo Autechre.
This track for me is Manchester, in the North West of England or more specifically it’s a coach journey — coming into Manchester City Centre in the late 1990s heading into Victoria Coach Station, along Oldham Road through Miles Platting and Ancoats in the east of the city on a cramped and sweaty National Express Bus.
This was a year after the large terrorist bombing in 1996 from which there would be sweeping cultural and physical changes to the city centre or regeneration.
Manchester in the 90s and 80s was a pretty run down place, and no more evidence of this could be seen than by entering the city from the east. This was a pretty depressing journey into the city. I had a great time in Manchester in the 90s but it was, physically at least, miserable but also at the same time exciting.
I’ve heard Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of Sheffield band Pulp, talk about walking around Sheffield in the 80s, listening to Scott Walker and John Barry in his headphones, it would add drama, his own exciting and melodramatic soundtrack to the city. Not necessarily as a means of escape from it more to experience it differently.
Sheffield mirrored Manchester in the 80s & 90s — this was the zenith of northern english post industrial decay. Personally I thrived in this kind of landscape. You can’t advocate a derelict city but it is quite a romantic kind of environment to grow up in, but then again I was young and didn’t have kids or a family to bring up.
Rettic AC and the 1997 album from which it’s taken from, Chiastic Slide, was the perfect soundtrack. I’d wallow in it; the melancholy, the harshness and drama. I wouldn’t need to conjure images, they were there right in front of me.
This was a landscape I grew up in. Autechre originally formed in Rochdale, which is just North of Oldham where I was born. Oldham and Rochdale are two towns that touch the edge of the Pennines that split Lancashire, the Greater Manchester area and Yorkshire.
This is a quote from Sean Booth from Autechre in 2001. It makes you think about folk music traditions or northern folk music traditions in a different way-
Yeah. And we were having loads of mushrooms out of a pot in a stove. Just buy a lot of mushrooms and get completely fucked. Just fucking moving around and messing with gear. At the time we thought it was a bit folky making music in your own house. Just for a few people who were there. It was always like these stages in folk music. It is quite funny with computers now. It is really getting like that.
I was raised in Salford which is a city and also part of Greater Manchester. The River Irwell divides Manchester City Centre and Salford. In 1994 I moved to Newcastle in the North East of England and have lived there since. I rarely go back to Salford and Manchester and don’t have any nostalgic, rose tinted longings but in the 90s I would make the coach trip down quite often, travelling through Yorkshire, across the pennines via the M62 motorway, highest motorway in England.
In 2010 Autechre released the Move of Ten series which contained this track called M62 -
I mentioned the explosion in 1996 and how the legacy of that changed Manchester. Here is another one, less talked about but no less significant in terms of what it represented. This is the demolition of the Stella Power Station on the River Tyne in 1992. The three huge cooling towers were a dominant feature on the Tyneside landscape for decades previous.
As the dust settled and the sonic waves of this explosion were absorbed by the surrounding landscape a veritable venn diagram would be revealed of colliding histories and narratives from the North East of England. What would emerge from these collisions would be a vision of the North East where by heritage, and in turn culture, would regenerate the region in the aftermath of decades of post industrial decline.
But what is the heritage we are talking about and whose culture exactly?
The history of the North East, Tyneside and Newcastle mirrors that of Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, this was the ‘workshop of the world’ coal, shipbuilding and the arms industry located in around Tyneside would power the British Empire at its peak. The fires of the Industrial Revolution would be powered in Newcastle. It’s the birth place of rail transport. The genesis of the modern technical, interconnected world that we know today would reveal itself in the North of England.
In the North East of England heritage and culture have replaced the former industries and nostalgia is its raw material.
Dominant popular narratives prevail in the North East and there is a distinct lack of variety in interpretation, especially concerning sonic and musical traditions of the late 20th Century. In comparison to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and that M62 belt of the North of England it is sadly overlooked.
Why is that? Is the North East and Tyneside less creative? One thing that has happened in the North East is that a dominant and narrow interpretation of its history and heritage has took root and the narrative is being presented in its most convenient and simplistic form.
It’s often wistful, mawkish and sanitised. It’s a narrative of loss and rebirth — it’s been looking for a rebirth since the 1980s and this has often been led by large government regeneration initiatives, it’s the cultural dominance of the quango.
This is what people are up against.
Fiercely proud Sting, his affected North East accent; flat caps waving, sepia toned memories of a time and place that never existed.
This is from a release on the record label Harbinger Sound from 2013 it reveals a very different narrative. It’s called The Curfew Recordings and the performers and producers are John Smith, Sean Dower and John Mylotte.
These recordings were made in March and July 1984 at a disused industrial site in Derwenthaugh, near Scotswood on the River Tyne. These were on site improvisations by Smith, Dower and Mylotte.
The liner notes of the album state the instrumentation used as-
Bull roarers, spirit whistles, human thy bone trumpets, chimes, pipes, gongs, flutes, drums, projectiles, scraped and bowed objects and other materials; glass, bones, metal and wood.
The steel structures were played and a passing goods train can be heard in the background. The notes also talk about personal circumstances accounting for the gap between recordings, they mention external factors and also that performers were under a police curfew — thus The Curfew Recordings.
What accounted for these external factors and the police curfew is that the three performers were part of a group called Metgumbnerbone. Described in local newspapers a Tibetan Trumpet Troupe.
They’d been arrested in 1984 after robbing graves from Westgate Road Cemetery in Newcastle’s West End and fashioning the bones for their improvised performances and on site recordings in what they described as the Ruins of Industry. Half of the group received custodial jail sentences. The magistrate on sentencing was convinced that occult practices were taking place.
Was this really satanic ritual or part of the zeitgeist and industrial music scenes that were emerging across Northern Europe in the 80s — in places like Belgium, Hull, Manchester and Sheffield in the UK?
A topographic and historical detail. Westgate Road is the oldest route and by-way into Newcastle Centre — Hadrian’s Wall lies directly underneath it and runs parallel to it.
The graveyard from which the group robbed, opened in 1829 and was one of England’s first public garden cemeteries, it closed for burials in the 1930s. It holds the grave of the Bruce Family, the Reverend John Collingwood Bruce, who died in 1892, was of one the first wave of hobbyist archeologists to study Hadrian’s Wall, his research became a standard text for antiquarian study in the 1930s. He also wrote the Northumbrian Minstrelsy: a study and historical record of 18th & 19th Century Northumberian and Tyneside Ballads, Melodies and Folk & Pipe Songs.
Zoviet*France are another group of North east producers that were seen as emerging from this Northern European industrial scene in the early 1980s. They’ve since gone on to defy categorisation and fashioned a long and successful career.
They formed in Newcastle in 1980 with ever shifting members and collaborators across the last 35 years . They are still based in the North East. Words like hypnagogic, alchemic, maximinimalist are used to describe their work. They use cheap and advanced technologies, basic dub tricky and field recordings. They are equally at home with max/msp and DAWs as they are with tape recorders, homemade acoustic instruments and primitive looping and sampling devices.
Zoviet*France are renowned globally but almost unheard of locally outside of select circles. This is an excerpt from their 1984 album Eostre-
Worlds collided when I got to see Zoviet*France and Autechre perform together in 1997 upstairs at the Cumberland Arms in Newcastle, a pretty small public house on the edge of Newcastle City Centre and home to Newcastle’s longest running and only remaining traditional folk sessions.
In 1980 a band called Venom performed their first gig at Westgate Hall in Newcastle, where they also rehearsed. Westgate Hall was a large methodist church hall and concert venue on Westgate Road, it is directly opposite the cemetery where Metgumbnerbone were arrested 4 years later.
90 years previous the hall held large temperance gatherings and served as a platform and base for emerging Socialists and the newly established Labour Party. It is currently home to the Hillsong Church, a global pentecostal christian megachurch movement.
Venom’s debut gig back in 1980 was hampered by the fact that for the first five minutes so many smoke pellets and pyrotechnics were set off that no one could see one foot in front of their faces. The US musician Henry Rollins described Venom as a joke — the living embodiment of Spinal Tap.
Venom’s second album released in 1982 was called Black Metal. They became very successful and in the early 80s were supported by the likes of Metallica.
Often derided critically they had a large cult following. They are cited as perhaps the most important influence in the development of black metal, thrash metal, death metal, and other related styles that are often grouped under the extreme metal umbrella. They directly influenced Nordic and Scandinavian extreme metal bands such as Bathory and Merciful Fate which in turn spawned the notorious 1990s Black Metal scene in Norway — bands like Mayhem, Burzum and Darkthrone.
Venom’s label was called Neat Records it was based out of Impulse Studios in Wallsend close to the erstwhile Shipbuilding area on the River Tyne in Newcastle’s East End. Neat and Impulse were wrapped up in 1995. The studios became derelict and were flooded in the mid 2000s. The Impulse Studios archive was donated to Tyne & Wear Archives 2 years ago. A huge collection of master tapes, photographic and promotional material, and hand drawn, handwritten song lyrics and album concepts.
This is Venom in 1985-
A Northern sound? A sweeping generalisation but I’m not sure there is one. We like to put things in boxes and our obsession with meaning and categorisation holds us back.
Technology is evolving rapidly, like no other time in human history, in parallel the listening experience has shifted dramatically, which is really exciting.
Of course landscape, light, the climate and the topography of place impact on the things we make, I’m not saying it doesn’t.
But I really don’t know what a Northern sound is. When the sparks fly though, when stories, narratives and cultures collide that’s interesting.
Brian Eno has wrote about Axis Thinking —
the continuum of possibilities between two extreme positions.
The intersections across different axes; histories, cultures, fashion, technologies and environments are what interest me.
Richard Dawson is as much influenced by Chicago House, British Hip Hop and improv chamber music as he by any Northumbrian Folk Tradition. In fact I don’t think he would ever describe himself as folk, which is a simplistic interpretation of his music. But what’s a folk tradition?
Chris Watson the sound recordist and founder member of Caberet Voltaire, who first released on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records label, his early cut up tape recordings and experiments in the early 80s reveal an interesting continiuum between industrial music and wildlife recordings.
Acid House, which is one thing I haven’t mentioned, revealed a complex web of connections rooted within a northern tradition of radicalism and entrepreneurship. The trans-european/trans-atlantic mutations of Acid House in the late 80s/early 90s owe as much to Japanese electronics and the motor city of Detroit as it does to the former cotton mills, condemned housing estates and wind swept moors of the North.
Music production, reproduction and distribution is evolving and changing at an exponential rate maybe to such a degree that it’s going to make the 20th Century and early 21st Century seem like a curious and weird blip in humanities relationship with music. Maybe we will abandon recorded music all together?
I think our parochial interpretation of music, the sonic experience and its relationship to the topography of our landscape and the cultures that inhabit it is really being tested — I think that’s a good thing.
What is our relationship with music going to be like in the future?
I’m always interested in the things we don’t know and what we cannot define. I’m not really interested in neatly repackaging and sealing a new narrative because when does the alternative story become the dominant one?
Michael McHugh 2017
